Mike Lyons, six days from his 63rd birthday, emerged before dawn from his suburban split-level on a cul-de-sac 32km from the remains of the World Trade Center. He was returning to work for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co after six days away.
A man of routines that stretch across a 44-year career on Wall Street, Lyons felt his world change in an instant last Tuesday morning, when he emerged from an elevator in the trade center's south tower to run an errand. He was greeted by the sound of an explosion.
A hijacked jet had slammed into the adjacent north tower, and Lyons joined 3,700 Morgan Stanley colleagues in fleeing the 22 floors they occupied in the complex.
A week later, more has changed for Lyons than that he sits at a folding table in a converted warehouse, not in front of a flat-screen computer monitor in a carpeted aerie with panoramic views of the Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty.
Friends and acquaintances have died. And as Lyons got back to work on Monday greetings were accompanied by bearhugs, kisses, and sobs.
"I've been through this twice now and I don't know how much more of this I can take," said Lyons, who was in the trade center when terrorists tried to topple the skyscrapers with explosives in 1993.
Lyons is a senior trader who helps mutual funds and other institutional investors make trades when they want more attention than provided by Morgan Stanley's automated systems. A beefy, fairhaired grandfather of three, Lyons emigrated from County Roscommon in 1957 and began work on Wall Street within a month.
"It was either that or the police," he said shortly after leaving for work.
Lyons cut through a newsstand, grabbed a coffee and newspaper, and boarded the 5:55am train to Hoboken at a suburban New Jersey station wedged between town hall and some ballfields. As the train rounded a final curve, the lower Manhattan skyline came into view.
"You used to be able to see the twin towers from here," he said. "Now, all you see is smoke." At Hoboken, Lyons switched to the cross-Hudson PATH line, stepping into a crowded train on the left, not the empty one on the right that he might have taken until last week. Once on foot in Manhattan, there was another moment of disorientation.
"It used to be you looked up and saw the towers and knew which direction you were headed in," he said. "There are a lot of people who are lost, they don't know where to go." Lyons destination was Morgan Stanley's temporary trading floor at 75 Varick Street, a block-long converted warehouse astride the entrances to the Holland Tunnel, a major artery closed for security reasons since last Tuesday.
He arrived shortly after 7am and for the next 2 and a half hours enjoyed reunions with colleagues of more than 20 years. He hadn't seen them since the world changed. Lyons gave an especially warm greeting to Walter Holder, a retail trader a week older than Lyons who's married to a County Roscommon lady.
"I quit smoking but as soon as I got out I wanted to light up a cigar," said Holder. "When I got home, I ordered a whole box -- if I'm going to die here I figure, `So I might get cancer, screw it.'"
In an adjacent room, tables were piled high with pastries and bagels.
"The last time this happened, I gained 15 pounds," Lyons said.
All over the room, traders exchanged whispered words about casualties of last week's attack. One spoke of a friend at Cantor Fitzgerald LP, a bond-trading firm in the north tower where almost 700 traders are missing. Several talked about George, a security guard whose last name they couldn't remember.
Beneath US flags, traders threw windows open to let in cool air that occasionally carried a hint of the acrid smoke that belched from the trade center rubble a mile to the south.
Just before 9:30am, more than 200 traders stood to share a moment of silence. Lyons leaned against a concrete pillar, first gazing up at the ceiling, then cupping his chin in his hands. At first slowly, then lustily, the assemblage sang God Bless America along with a televised broadcast from the New York Stock Exchange.
At the end of the song, Eileen Hillock, an administrative coordinator, ran up to Lyons and hugged him in tears. The two got to know each other at 75 Varick Street after the last bombing, and Lyons later convinced her to move her family to his neighborhood. "He changed my life," she sobbed.
When the bell rang to open trading, the group whooped and applauded.
For the next hour, Lyons juggled calls from mutual fund managers and other institutional investors, most of whom wanted to buy shares made newly cheap. He processed seven orders in the first hour, fewer than normal as clients appeared to heed the firm's advice to use electronic trading systems instead of traders to place orders.
The traders shouted figures -- not economic statistics or analyses of the US Federal Reserve's half-point interest rate cut, which drew barely a murmur. Instead, they called out phone numbers for floor brokers and money managers who can no longer be reached by speed-dial or a flip through rolodexes buried and lost.
Lyons filled an order open since last week to buy 5,000 shares of credit card issuer MBNA Corp at US$4 less than last week, saving a client US$20,000. He glanced at the television as the Dow Jones Industrials at first declined more than 600 points, then pulled back to a less than 500 point loss.
"We're trading a little rough around the edges, but we'll be OK," he says as he drinks his fifth cup of coffee at 10:30am.
"I guess if it goes down another 600, they stop trading. But we're not going there."
At the end of the day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average recorded its worst loss in four years, sliding 7.1 percent. The New York Stock Exchange had its busiest day.
"We got through it," said Lyons. "We got the day over with and that was a victory. It's a lot better than sitting around and watching television."
Morgan Stanley officials began gathering at the site, an operations center they have maintained as an emergency backup since 1993, as the rubble was still tumbling Tuesday afternoon.
"Tuesday was the human side trying to find all our people," said Douglas Matthews, Lyons' boss and manager of listed -- New York Stock Exchange -- trading. "After that, we tried to figure out how much space we needed, phone lines and such." Matthews said tech support staff had been working around the clock since last Tuesday. Pointing at Lyons he said. ``We've got some old professionals here who've been through crises before, but not like this.''
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